Sister: A Novel (35 page)

Outside I could hear people in the bright afternoon sunshine, but in the toilets building I was invisible to them. He’d taken off his tie and used it to bind my hands behind my back.

‘You called her Tess, the first time I met you.’

Still keeping him talking - the only way to stay alive. And still needing to know.

‘Yes, it was a stupid blunder,’ he replied. ‘And it shows I’m not good at this, doesn’t it? I’m useless at subterfuge and lies.’

But he had been good at it. He’d manipulated me from the start, guiding conversations and subtly deflecting questions. From my wanting your notes to asking who was in charge of the CF trial at St Anne’s he’d made sure I had no real information. He’d even given an excuse, in case his acting wasn’t convincing.

‘Christ, it makes you talk like, I don’t know, somebody else, somebody off the telly or something.’

Because that was what he was imitating.

‘I didn’t
plan
this. A vandal threw a stone through her window not me; she just thought it was targeted at her.’

He was using twine to tie my legs together.

‘The lullabies?’ I asked.

‘I was panicking, just doing whatever came into my head. The CD was in the post-natal ward. I took it home, not really knowing what I was doing. Not thinking anything through. I never stopped to think she’d record the lullabies onto a tape. Who has an answerphone nowadays with a tape? Everyone’s got an answer service with their telephone provider.’

He was lurching between the minutiae of the everyday and the large horror of murder. The enormity of what he had done ensnared in small domestic details.

‘You knew Mitch’s notes would be useless, because Kasia would never be believed.’

‘The worst-case scenario was that you took her boyfriend’s notes to the police. And made a fool of yourself.’

‘But you needed me to trust you.’

‘It was you who kept on going with this. Making me do this. You left me no other choice.’

But I’d trusted him before he produced Mitch’s notes, long before. And it had been my insecurity that had helped him. I’d thought my suspicion of him was because of my customary anxiety around handsome men, rather than seriously suspecting him of your murder, and so had dismissed it. He was the one person in all this who’d been about me - not about you.

But I’d been thinking too long; I couldn’t allow a silence to grow between us.

‘It was you not Dr Nichols who was the researcher who found the gene?’

‘Yes. Hugo’s a sweet man. But hardly brilliant.’

His tale about Dr Nichols had been a boast as much as a deceit. I realised that he had been framing Dr Nichols from early on, carefully casting the shadow of guilt onto him so that it wouldn’t fall on himself. The long-term planning was viciously calculated.

‘Imperial College and their absurd ethics committee wouldn’t allow a human trial,’ continued William. ‘They didn’t have the vision. Or the guts to go for it. Imagine it, a gene that increases IQ, think of what that means. Then Gene-Med approached me. My only requirement was that they ran human trials.’

‘Which they did.’

‘No. They lied; let me down. I—’

‘You really believe that? The directors of Gene-Med are pretty bright. I’ve read their biographies. They’re certainly clever enough to want someone else to do their work for them. To take the rap in case it went wrong.’

He shook his head, but I could see I’d got to him. An avenue was opening up and I ran hell for leather down it. ‘Genetic enhancement, that’s where the real money lies, isn’t it? As soon as it becomes legal it’ll be huge. And Gene-Med want to be ahead of the game, ready for it.’

‘But they can’t know.’

‘They’ve been playing you, William.’

But I’d done it wrong, too scared to be as slick as I’d needed to be; I’d simply dented his ego and released new anger. He’d been holding the knife almost casually, now his fingers tightened around it.

‘Tell me about the human trial, what happened?’

His fingers were still gripping the knife, but the knuckles no longer showed white, so he wasn’t gripping as hard. In his other hand he held a torch. He had come equipped for this: knife and torch and bicycle chain, a grotesque parody of a Boy Scout trip. I wondered what else he’d thought to bring.

Mr Wright holds my hand and I’m again overwhelmingly grateful, not brushing away kindness any more.

‘He told me that in humans his IQ gene codes for two totally different things. It affects not only memory capacity but also lung function. It meant that the babies couldn’t breathe when they were born.’

I’m so sorry, Tess.

‘He told me that if the babies are intubated immediately after they’re born, if they’re helped to breathe for a while, they’d be fine. They’d live.’

He had made me lie on the floor, on my left side, the damp cold of the concrete was seeping into my body. I tried to move but my limbs were too heavy. He must have drugged me when he gave me the tea. I could only use words to stay alive.

‘But you didn’t help them to breathe, did you? Xavier. Hattie’s baby.’

‘It wasn’t my fault. It’s a rare lung disorder and someone would ask questions. I just need to be left alone. Then there would be no problems. It’s other people, crowding around me, not giving me space.’

‘So you lied to them about what really killed their babies?’

‘I couldn’t risk people asking questions.’

‘And me? Surely you’re not going to stage my suicide, like you staged Tess’s? Frame me for my own murder like you did my sister? Because if it happens twice the police are bound to be suspicious.’

‘Staged? You make it sound so thought out. I didn’t plan it, I told you that. You can see that because of my mistakes, can’t you? My research and my trial I planned in meticulous detail, but not this. I was forced into doing this. I even paid them, for God’s sake, not stopping to think that it might look suspicious. And I never thought they might talk to each other.’

‘So why did you pay them?’

‘It was just kindness, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure they had a decent diet, so the developing foetuses had the optimum conditions. It was meant to be spent on food, not bloody clothes.’

I didn’t dare ask him if there were others or how many. I didn’t want to die with that knowledge. But there were some things I needed to know.

‘What made you choose Tess? Because she was single? Poor?’

‘And Catholic. Catholic women are far less likely to terminate when they know there’s a problem with their baby.’

‘Hattie is Catholic?’

‘Millions of Filipinos are Catholic. Hattie Sim put it on her form, no father’s name mind you, but her religion.’

‘Did her baby have cystic fibrosis?’

‘Yes. Whenever I could I treated the cystic fibrosis and tested my gene out too. But there weren’t enough babies who fitted all the criteria.’

‘Like Xavier?’

He was silent.

‘Did Tess find out about your trial? Is that why you killed her?’

He hesitated a moment. His tone was close to self-pitying; I think that he genuinely hoped I would understand.

‘There was another consequence that I hadn’t foreseen. My gene got into the mother’s ovaries. It means there is the same genetic change in every egg and if the women have more babies they will have the same problem with their lungs.

Logistically I couldn’t expect to be there for the next baby, or the next. People move house, move away. Eventually someone would discover what was going on. That’s why Hattie had to have a hysterectomy. But Tess’s labour was too quick. She arrived at the hospital with the baby’s head already engaged. There wasn’t time to do a caesarean, let alone an emergency hysterectomy.’

You hadn’t found out anything at all.

He killed you because your body was living evidence against him.

Around us people are starting to leave the park, the grass turning from green to grey, the air cooling into evening. My bones ache with cold and I focus on the warmth of Mr Wright’s hand, holding mine.

‘I asked him what made him do it; suggested it was money. He was furious, told me his motives weren’t avaricious. Impure. He said he wouldn’t be able to sell a gene, which hadn’t been legally trialled. Fame wasn’t motivating him either. He couldn‘t publish his results.’

‘So did he tell you the reason?’

‘Yes.’

I’ll tell you what he said out here, in this grey-green park in the cool fresh air. Neither of us need to return to that building to hear him.

‘He said that science has the power that religion once claimed, but it’s real and provable, not superstition and cant. He said that miracles don’t happen in fifteenth-century churches but in research labs and hospitals. He said the dead are brought back to life in ITU units; the lame walk again after hip replacements; the blind see again because of laser surgery. He told me that in the new millennium there are new deities with real, provable powers and that the deities are scientists who are improving what it is to be human. He said that his gene would one day safely get into the gene pool and that would mean who we are as humans would be irrevocably changed for the better.’

His overweening hubris was huge and naked and shocking.

He was shining his torch in my face and I couldn’t see him. I was still trying to move but my body had been too drugged by the spiked tea to respond to my brain’s screamed commands for action.

‘You followed her into the park that day?’

I dreaded hearing it, but I needed to know how you died.

‘When the boy left, she sat on a bench and started writing a letter, in the snow. Extraordinary thing to do, don’t you think?’

He looked at me, waiting for my response, as if this were a regular conversation and I realised I would be the first and last person to whom he’d tell his story. Our story.

‘I waited a while, to make sure the boy wasn’t coming back. Ten minutes maybe. She was relieved when she saw me, I told you that, didn’t I? She smiled. We had a good rapport. I’d brought a Thermos of hot chocolate and gave her a cup.’